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In April, 1998, on the 30th anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King, the Star reported that his convicted assassin, James Earl Ray, patronized the Silver Dollar Room on Spadina Ave. when he was on the lam in Toronto.

In 2004, a Star story about the Hotel Waverly once again stated that Ray frequented the hotel’s Silver Dollar saloon in 1968, adding “and some say he stayed at the hotel itself.”

In May, 2012, a story in the Star’s sister paper, the Grid, reported that while hiding out in Toronto, America’s then most wanted man “whiled away his evenings at bars like Spadina Avenue’s Silver Dollar.”

This is a great Toronto yarn, an intriguing footnote to history. But I have it on exceedingly good authority that what we have here is an urban myth run amok.

“This is wrong,” Robert Benzie, the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief, informed me this week after seeing this apocryphal tale recounted in the Star.

“How do I know?” Benzie said. “Because Ray told me so himself.”

Benzie interviewed Ray in 1993 at Nashville’s
Riverbend Maximum Security Institute
while reporting for the Ottawa Sun. Benzie had written a letter to the convicted killer seeking an interview to mark the 25th anniversary of King’s murder. Ray talked to just three reporters: Benzie, a People magazine writer and a London newspaper reporter.

Ray, who corresponded with Benzie for several years after, died in prison in 1998 while serving a 99-year sentence for King’s assassination. Though he had first confessed to the murder, he later recanted claiming he pleaded guilty under duress.

In the 1993 Sun interview, Ray spoke with Benzie about the month following King’s murder when he hid out in rooming houses on Ossington Ave. and Dundas St. W. after fleeing to Toronto from Memphis.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time Benzie has set the record straight in the Star on this pervasive legend, seemingly rooted in early (overzealous, perhaps) reporting by Toronto reporters in the days following Ray’s infamous sojourn here. Reports indicate at least one Silver Dollar stripper claimed she saw Ray there.

Some 15 years after talking with Ray, Benzie, by then a Star reporter, went back through his more than two hours of interview tapes to write
a feature on the 40th anniversary of King’s death.
For the first time ever, he reported Ray’s response to his questions about the Silver Dollar.

“I’ve never heard of that place,” Ray told Benzie, likely the only reporter to have had an opportunity to verify — or more precisely, debunk — the myth of King’s convicted killer and the Silver Dollar.

Rather, Ray described visiting a bar around the corner from Ossington, toward Dundas, but in the other direction from the Silver Dollar. As Benzie reported in 2008, that was quite likely the Drake Hotel.

It was particularly galling to Benzie that the paper that had refuted this urban myth five years ago would once again repeat it this week. That’s understandable. But so too is reporter Andrew Livingstone’s explanation here.

Though Livingstone checked the Star’s electronic files, he did not see Benzie’s 2008 piece. And to be clear, he did not state as fact that Ray had spent time at the Silver Dollar, only that he was “said to have” drunk there.

“I wish I’d found that article from Benzie,” Livingstone said. “I would have made it more clear that it was a story that had attached itself to the bar and hotel.”

A story indeed, and certainly a compelling one. But as the verified facts tell us, a story with no basis in fact.

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